Influence—and the business of building, maintaining, and exerting it—is more complicated than ever.
At a time of rapid AI adoption and algorithm-driven discovery, questions of trust, credibility, and integrity, and how all these shape influence, are naturally front and center among those of us in communications. Every rule learned and taught over the last 10 years has been shaken, and the old pillars of influence have collapsed.
In their place are these 10 new truths of influence we witness every single day at our work in Vero. These are truths that, we expect, will shape the next era of communications across the region.
A government’s endorsement. A media feature. A prestigious forum stage.
These types of borrowed authority from big names, institutions, and platforms are a thing of the past. Though these served as credibility multipliers in 2015, today’s audiences are a lot more discerning.
After all, we’ve watched enough institutional actors behave badly that borrowed authority now requires more verification. People are no longer asking whether a brand or message is credible, but rather: “Do I, in my context, believe you?”
Amid today’s fragmentation and lightning-speed communications, credibility flows through networks of reciprocal trust, often invisible to outsiders. A key individual known in his community for thirty years —what Indonesians may call “tokoh”—can outweigh any institutional endorsement that money can buy.
With the rise of AI, people can’t always tell what is fake. So instead, they’ve started assuming everything might be.
This poses a new challenge for communicators, one that is only going to be more complicated as the technology evolves and more people use it. That’s because the rise of generative AI has not produced skilled detectors of synthetic content. Rather, it has produced pre-emptive sceptics.
A brand’s genuine content, real spokesperson, authentic campaign—these are all introduced in an environment where the default assumption is potential fabrication.
Once seen as a separate realm from commerce, geopolitics now permeates everything—and understandably so.
For us in Indonesia, we sit at the center of the world’s most contested narrative battleground. The US-China, Middle East rivalry plays out daily in how audiences read foreign-brand communications, interpret MNC behavior, and decide whose side an organization is on. Our Southeast Asian neighbors experience similar tensions.
Thus, neutrality is no longer a safe stance, because audiences now read this silence as a choice. Brands who choose not to take a position will have to settle for one assigned to them by audiences—which is almost never a good thing.
Despite today’s communications challenges, hope is far from lost.
The audience is still very much there; it’s just that the paths to them are no longer as straightforward. And in some ways, this can be exciting.
Some paths run through territory that most communications strategies have not yet charted. A few examples include:
- Dark social: Private channels are where Indonesia’s highest-trust conversations happen—invisible to standard monitoring tools and its privacy protected by encryption. This is the “backstage” where people have the freedom to be more candid and controversial. Ideas bouncing in this space could quickly take root without any outsider knowing.
- Forensic vetting: This is the new minimum for every trust broker relationship in an AI-saturated market. In high-stakes engagement, people don’t immediately place trust upon seeing credentials. They conduct their own investigative processes to proactively uncover hidden risks and inconsistencies by looking beyond a brand’s marketing materials and self-reported data.
- Credible islands: These are the 3–5 voices whose endorsement survives a disinformation crisis. Think of situations where lives are at stake, like a terrorist attack, major transportation incident, or disasters. In these moments, people don’t go to just anyone for information. They crowd the credible islands. Think: the news program that has been around for 20 years, an expert whose information delivery is precise and calibrated, or a public official known for honesty.
Imagine this: Your brand partners with an influencer with 2.4 million followers, only to realize that 800,000 of them aren’t real people. You end up finding out the same day that the journalists did.
Indonesia’s influencer economy is one of the world’s most active—and, unfortunately, one of the most sophisticated at manufacturing engagement. AI-assisted follower inflation, coordinated inauthentic networks, and partially synthetic personas are market realities, not edge cases.
The risk extends beyond internal accountability; as the brand’s integrity comes under scrutiny, it remains to be seen whether its borrowed reach will reinforce its reputation or accelerate its erosion.
Social proof has always shaped influence—but today, it no longer comes from what brands amplify. Rather, it comes from what people validate privately.
The challenge for brands is that audiences rarely tell brands when trust is gone. But the group chat knows, and that’s enough to move the needle.
The question now is, can a brand be in the group chat? Or better yet, can it make its own channel the “group chat” where conversation flows candidly and adds value to the community?
These days, brands may need to say the same thing fourteen times. The first thirteen builds familiarity; the fourteenth time is when the message finally lands.
The reason for this isn’t that audiences are failing to focus. They are simply rationing their focus. With so many brands trying to be heard, people make constant micro-decisions about which sources have earned the right to sustained attention.
In a world of noise, repetition from an untrusted source only serves to accelerate disengagement. In contrast, repetition from a trusted source builds the evidence architecture that moves people to action.
Audiences make implicit risk calculations before every public brand engagement. Sharing, commenting, publicly endorsing—these are all acts of personal vouching in a culture where reputation is communal and social consequences are very much real.
Thus, the barrier brands must consider when thinking about how to turn audiences into advocates isn’t technological. It is reputational.
Audiences need to believe a brand is safe and credible before they put their name beside it. In a low-trust environment, public support begins with this type of private confidence.
Influence is different from exposure.
The reality of communications today is that a brand can reach twelve million people and still move no one. After all, reach numbers on algorithmic platforms tend to be a function of spend, not resonance.
Without the right message, delivered the right way, and to the right people, even the healthiest-looking dashboards may still have commercial outcomes that fall flat.
Consider these three scenarios:
- A deepfake interview produced in forty minutes and distributed to a million people before anyone in your organization knows it exists;
- A campaign that reads neutral in your HQ but is a politically incorrect statement in East Java;
- A creator you partnered with posts off-brief content that contradicts your brand values before your team has even reviewed the draft.
In each of these cases, the issue doesn’t begin at the point of backlash. It begins earlier, in your blind spots. By the time it reaches your team, the story is already in motion, shaped by audiences who have filled in the gaps themselves.
And in this environment, perception defaults to intent. Any misstep—real or perceived—is quickly interpreted as deliberate, and therefore, guilty. The benefit of the doubt that traditional crisis playbooks were designed to rely on no longer holds.
The one thing these 10 new truths of influence make clear
Ultimately, what these 10 new truths of influence reveal is this: Trust is not an output of visibility—it is the infrastructure that makes real influence possible at all.
In a landscape shaped by algorithms, accelerated by AI, and fractured across platforms and cultures, visibility is easy to manufacture. Credibility is not.
The signals today’s audiences are using to decide what (and who) to believe are constantly shifting, and they are often formed long before brands have the chance to respond. What you build from here, then, cannot be acquired or engineered through scale alone. It can only be earned.
The organizations that succeed in this next era of influence won’t be those that are seen the most, but those that are trusted enough to be believed.
These are the conversations we’re having every day with each other and our partners across the region. If you’d like to explore how these truths apply to your brand or market, we’re always open to a conversation. Get in touch today!
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Fuad Arrasyid is a communication strategist with 11+ years of professional experience, a love for social science, and passion for adventures.
Muthia Pratiwy is a communications enthusiast with 10 years of experience bringing people and ideas together. She is also a music lover and a passionate globetrotter.
